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City of Light and Darkness

Goethe and Schiller made the city an intellectual and artistic mecca. Then the Nazis made it a stronghold.

By

T.J. Reed

Jan. 23, 2015 4:44 p.m. ET

What’s in a town? What’s in a name? Why does Weimar have an aura so awkwardly mixed of celebration, disillusion and reproach? You wouldn’t credit larger, more diffuse locations (London, Paris) with every last cultural initiative of the day or lay every political disaster at their door. But the tiny city of Weimar had its share of both, half-fulfilling or disappointing the expectations created by its 18th-century “golden age” until, in the 20th century, it housed their brutal contrary, Nazism.